The novel has an episodic feel throughout but ties up nicely.

The story is a classic 'chamber opera.' All the action takes place in the environs of Matilda.Solomon adds an Afrofuturist flair peppering the story with lower deck fables that have a West African flavor to them. Aster's ASD is a good window for the novel to resonate on the meanings of words and drop lots of medical terminology without losing its flow. She's brilliant but also has to systematically parse what her interlocutors are saying to understand them. Aster is toward the end of the autism spectrum that used to be classified as Asbergers. The story provides a good balance of character, plot and world-building. Aster and her traumatized friends set out to work out the secret code left in Aster's mother's notebooks that may show the way for Matilda to end its 300 year (ship time) sojourn through the stars. However, this is not meditation on a society of true hermaphrodites a la Sturgeon or LeGuin. The protagonist and the nation she belongs to are medically intersex. Their proximity to the Baby sun's radiation affects their health etc. Low deckers are subject to work shifts in the fields nourished by Matilda's internal sun Baby. This novel is about a renegade scientist, Aster, living on the bottom of a generation ship's a social hierarchy due to her skin color and the deck she was born on. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer and sowing the seeds of civil war, Aster learns there may be a way off the ship if she's willing to fight for it. When the autopsy of Matilda's sovereign reveals a surprising link between his death and her mother's suicide some quarter century before, Aster retraces her mother's footsteps. On its way the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster, whom they consider to be less than human. For generations the Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. If she were truly a monster, as they accuse, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remained of her world, save for stories told around the cookfire.Īster lives in the low-deck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. She's used to the names she only wishes there was more truth to them. Odd-mannered, obsessive, withdrawn, Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak.

An unkindness of ghosts review